To think of San Diego brings images of sun-soaked beaches to mind, but for Caleb Chial of Swim Team his local scenery conjured a much hazier sentiment. After years of playing in more collaborative projects around his hometown, on his first solo bedroom project Chial conjured the shoreline's more tumultuous moods to build haunting textures around the sort of California shine that's adamantly ingrained in even the most gloomiest of days.

Swim Team's first singles, "Clairvoyant" and "I'll Always Come Back," were born from the inspiration Chial found in a partly broken synthesizer he discovered in the garage of the house he'd been living in. It hadn't been his intent to start another project but his first experience making music with anything but a guitar or piano motivated him to pursue a new creative energy.

"It was a completely different approach to making music for me," he says. "I was living in this tiny bedroom and I was amazed at how I could create these lush soundscapes without even having access to 'real' instruments. I was pretty late to discover the computer side of making music but it’s definitely had a big influence on how my songs are put together and the kind of sounds I use. Most of my lyrics aren’t too personal, more observations of things around me instead of expressions of my own feelings or experiences."